1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a bridge device for a disk drive, especially to a bridge device having a disk tray controlling interface that allows an external automatic controlling apparatus to control the disk tray of the disk drive to move in or out and to obtain the present status of the disk tray.
2. Description of Related Art
A general disk drive requires a bridge device to communicate with a computer, since the disk drive and the computer uses different data format.
With reference to FIG. 6, the disk drive (50) is electronically connected to the computer (40). The computer (40) has a USB port (41). Since the bridge device (51) also has an USB port (511), the USB port (511) of the bridge device (51) is connected to the USB port (41) of the computer (40). The bridge device (51) converts disk data from the disk drive (50) to computer data format or converts computer data from the computer (40) to disk data format. Therefore, the computer (40) outputs controlling commands to drive the disk drive (50) and then obtains disk data and disk tray status.
Based on the foregoing description, the disk drive can be driven by the computer through the bridge device. However, since the present automatic controlling apparatus controls multiple disk drives to operate, the computer or computers are necessary. Therefore, the cost of controlling multiple disk drives by the automatic controlling apparatus is not cheap.